Daily Archives: March 27, 2011

March 25, 2011- The Wisconsin Supreme Court justice that recently admitted to calling a female colleague a "bitch" now has another problem.

Progressives in the state have launched an ad campaign against Justice David Prosser, suggesting that he's on the side of child molesters.

While District Attorney of Outagamie County in 1979, Prosser had refused to prosecute a priest that had allegedly sexually abused two children.

"I was ready to take the stand," Troy Merryfield, one of the abused children, told the Mulwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel years later. "He (Prosser) said it would be too embarrassing for a kid my age and said what jury would believe a kid testifying against a priest?"

"A priest sexually abuses children for 30 years across Wisconsin," the ad begins. "A mother tells tell D.A. David Prosser her two young sons were sexually assaulted."

March 25, 2011- Yet another shoe has dropped in the battle over Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's (R) anti-public employee union law — with state Republican leaders now apparently defying or attempting to circumvent a court order that temporarily blocked implementation of the law.

Last week, a judge in Dane County (Madison) blocked the law on procedural grounds, ruling that a key conference committee used to advance the bill — and to get around the state Senate Dems' walkout from the state — had violated the state open-meetings law by failing to give proper 24-hours notice.

The judge's order "restrain[ed] and enjoin[ed] the further implementation" of the law, including the prevention of Secretary of State Doug LaFollette (D) from publishing the act in the Wisconsin State Journal, which acts as the state's official newspaper for the purpose of giving the public official notice of new laws — the final step for the law to take effect. That decision is now going through an appeals process, which remains up in the air.

March 26, 2011- As we've reported, a whole new controversy broke out tonight in Wisconsin as state Republicans appeared to defy a court to put into immediate effect the governor's controversial anti-union bill. I wanted to take a quick moment and focus in on the nitty-gritty of the issues involved.

Most of the controversy has centered on the modalities of just how a law goes into effect in Wisconsin. The normal way this is done is when the Secretary of State formally publishes the law in what is deemed state's official newspaper, the Wisconsin State Journal. Republicans say they got another state agency called the Legislative Reference Bureau (LRB) to publish it. And that's good enough to make it law, despite the LRB saying it doesn't.

In other words, the argument here is that they may be violating the spirit of the judge's decision but nonetheless found a technical way around the decision. And the law is all about the technicalities.

March 25, 2011- Six key organizers with the Jimmy John’s Workers’ Union in Minneapolis were fired on Tuesday, March 22, after putting up posters around the city demanding paid sick days from the sandwich chain. According to David Boehnke, one of the discharged workers, the six workers received notices that they were fired for “defaming the brand and disloyalty to the company.”

The Jimmy John’s Workers’ Union, which is affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), garnered national media attention last year, as it would have been the first union in the American fast food industry. These workers' struggles could have implications for the entire service sector.

Maine Governor Paul LePage thinks the mural depicting the state's labor history is "not in keeping with the [Labor Department's] pro-business goals."

March 24, 2011- Maine Governor Paul LePage has ordered state workers to remove from the state labor department a 36-foot mural depicting the state’s labor history. Among other things the mural illustrates the 1937 shoe mill strike in Auburn and Lewiston. It also features the iconic “Rosie the Riveter,” who in real life worked at the Bath Iron Works. One panel shows my predecessor at the U.S. Department of Labor, Frances Perkins, who was buried in Newcastle, Maine.

The LePage Administration is also renaming conference rooms that had carried the names of historic leaders of American labor, as well as former Secretary Perkins.

The Governor’s spokesman explains that the mural and the conference-room names were “not in keeping with the department’s pro-business goals.”

You may recall that, just last week, a Wisconsin judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking the publication of the controversial anti-collective bargaining law, thereby denying Governor Walker the ability to enforce the law until a fuller hearing can be held on the issue.

That hearing is set to begin on Tuesday, March 29th.

Despite the court’s order, the law was published today by the Legislative Reference Bureau and posted on the state legislature website.

While the director of the Bureau, Steve Miller, insists that his publication of the law will not bring it into effect until such time as Secretary of State Doug La Follette publishes the law in a newspaper, not everyone agrees – including Mr. La Follette who indicated that he would have to get some legal advice on the issue before weighing in.

It was Mr. La Follette who was barred by the court from publishing the law pending a further hearing.

April 1, 1996- When Senator Bob Dole is declared the Republican nominee for President at the GOP convention in San Diego this summer, two wealthy Kansas oilmen almost certainly will be in the wings joining in the applause. They are the brothers Charles G. and David Koch (pronounced "coke"), who together control about 80% of Wichita-based Koch Industries Inc. Koch's $25 billion-plus in annual revenues make it the nation's second-largest privately held corporation and the biggest independent oil company.

March 22, 2011- Koch Oil may have fooled the mainstream Right, but they couldn’t fool their own family. William Koch, brother of Charles and David has described his own family’s oil business as “…organized crime and management driven from the top down”. In this report you can read how Koch Oil knowingly and maliciously stole oil from poor Native Americans in Oklahoma as a normal business practice.

Business Week, hardly a bastion of progressive thought, reported it as follows: